Fantastic Metropolis

7. Donnie Darko (2001)

First-time director Richard Kelly crafts the purest black comedy in recent years and a hell of a time travel movie. Jake Gylenhaal (October Sky) delivers an astounding performance as a disturbed teenager who is told the world will end in 28 days by a visitor from the future dressed in a soiled bunny suit.

8. The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Makes this list simply because of the level of challenge presented by the book—no one could have made a better or more visually spectacular film of Tolkien’s work than Peter Jackson has. Wonderfully cast. Viggo Mortensen’s Strider may do for his career what Han Solo did for Harrison Ford. The best genre epic ever.

9. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Wes Anderson (Rushmore) matures as a director in this comedy with a heart about an eccentric American family that is redolent of Sallinger and John Irving, but more entertaining than either. Co-writer and performer Owen Wilson continues to prove that he is one of the two or three most talented young American actors.

10/10A. Memento (2000) and Sexy Beast (2000)

A double entry of noir films. Memento almost drowns in its relentless cleverness, but nonetheless succeeds in expanding the genre. Guy Pearce is alternately helpless and menacing as a man who has lost his short term memory and so, in order to find his wife’s murderer, must tattoo important clues on his skin and take photographs of everyone he meets. Beast, the latest in the excellent tradition of British gangster films, introduces American audiences to Ray Winstone, the British James Gandolfini, and offers Ben Kingsley as a clenched fist of a man who tries to persuade Winstone, who has retired from a life of crime in Spain, to return to England to rob a bank.

Honorable Mention: It is not a great movie—director Ron Howard saw to that—but Russell Crowe’s thoroughly persuasive performance as a schizophrenic genius mathematician makes A Beautiful Mind (2001) well worth the two-hour plus investment. It appears that Crowe won the Oscar for the wrong movie.